


To save you, my prince

by MysteryofaBloodRedRose



Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Crossover, F/M, What-If
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 11:28:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14810498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MysteryofaBloodRedRose/pseuds/MysteryofaBloodRedRose
Summary: After her mother's tragic death, Ophélie Howard finds herself completely alone...and at the mercy of the one who wants her late mother's inheritance. Things go so far that an attempted murder takes place against her.But, after having almost drowned, Ophélie not only unexpectedly survives...but she finds herself in another place during another time...and in another body.She's now Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius, chief counsellor of the Danish king at the court of Elsinore. Still with her memory untouched, dragged into a world made of palace intrigues, envies, murders, vengeful ghosts and madness, and being the centre of the unwanted attentions of brooding Prince Hamlet, Ophélie must find a way to go back to her former life...before she becomes the victim of the story Shakespeare wrote many years ago.





	To save you, my prince

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so...this is an experiment :P  
> Before you start throwing eggs and tomatoes at me, I want you to know that I highly respect Shakespeare's works and that "Hamlet" is one of my favourite stories of all time. So, I'll try to do this keeping the full respect to it and its author.  
> Also, I want you to know that I'm Italian, so I beg you pardon for my mistakes. Feel free to correct me in the reviews, if you want, so I can improve. I have a copy of "Hamlet" both in Italian and Old English languages, but being this a sort of "retelling" (let's call it that way) I'll try to write it in today-English - including the original dialogues.  
> Please, tell me what do you think about it. I'll be very glad to know your opinion.

My mother didn't know any fairytale.

I enjoyed thinking I was a clever child, but I knew it wasn't the truth; as a matter of fact, for what I could recall, I've always been kind of a dummy. Let's say I was disenchanted. By the way, by the age of seven or eight I knew very well that the _I don't know any fairytale, honey_ thing was just a tired parents' pretence for not filling their children's heads with dragons, fairies, princes and princesses, happily ever after and all that shit before putting them to sleep.

Just like “Sugar, I spent the whole damn day working like a slave for paying you that bed you're lying in, so please get the fuck to sleep!”.

I didn't judge those parents badly.

But for my mother, that wasn't a pretence. She _truly_ meant it, that she didn't know any fairytale. And I knew it because she loved telling me stories.

I didn't even have to ask her. Every evening, before she left for work, I put my pajamas on and she made me sit next to her on the sofa, and she told me a story before leaving me with the nanny for the night. She just didn't tell me fairytales.

At the age of six, all my classmates knew the story of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and all that stuff. I didn't. Speaking of that, I remember a very embarrassing afternoon after my teacher called my mother to school because she feared something wrong was going on at our home: the reason was that day she announced us we were going to read _Snow White_ , and I raised my hand asking if “snow white” was some kind of cocaine.

I learnt the classical fairytales quite late in my life, at about the age of eleven or twelve, when aunt Juliet gave me a fairytale book as a present for Christmas; but before that, I grew up listening to the greek legends of gods and heroes, to Sophocles and Euripides' tragedies, to the story of king Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

My mother didn't know any fairytale, but she knew a lot of wonderful stories. As a child, I knew Achilles' fury and Hector's death almost by heart, I dreamt of Lancelot and Guinevere's love, I felt bad for Persephone's kidnapping. My mother read me _The Count of Montecristo_ , _Anna Karenina_ , _Don Quixote_ and _The Great Gatsby_ : those novels were her fairytales, just like the theatre was her world.

More than anything, my mother loved telling me the stories of history's most famous plays.

She loved her work. She loved William Shakespeare's plays.

And she couldn't come to term with the fact that _I_ , her only precious daughter, couldn't stand any of them. But sadly for her, it was the truth.

I _hated_ Shakespeare.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed it.  
> Please, rate and review :).


End file.
